Deborah Eisenberg

By TIME StaffThursday, June 30, 2011

Peter Hapak for TIME

There's a book that I absolutely adore called Skylark, written by a Hungarian writer, Dezso Kosztolanyi, in the 1920s. On the surface, it seems very simple and local, the story of a homely girl in a small Hungarian town, but it is electrifying, hilarious and unbelievably painful. It encapsulates just about all of human experience, like a magic diorama you enter that becomes absolutely real and endless.

Eisenberg's most recent book is The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg